Shadow of the War Machine (The Secret Order) (25 page)

“Truth is a slippery beast. I didn’t know Cressida was with child. Had I known, I might have done things differently.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, pressing his fingers to his eyes, then inhaled quickly as he lifted his head and steeled his expression once more. “I loved her once. Now she has taken everything.”

“What does she intend to do with the juggernaut?” I had to get him off the subject of all we had lost. We were together at last, and together we would find our way out again.

“It’s not the machine she’s after. It’s the modified plans.” Papa stood from the chair and walked toward the deadly cage. “As I said, she intends to use the machine to attempt to stop a war.”

The
Méduse
was sailing to the United States on the New Year. “She wishes to interfere in the War Between the States? What good would that do? Neither England nor France is closely allied in that war.”

“No, but her business fortunes are dependent on a plentiful supply of cotton. She has some very lucrative contracts with certain plantation owners. Should the South be defeated in their civil war, Cressida would lose a great deal of money,
and she won’t stand for that. She intends to sell the plans for the juggernaut to the Confederate army and has deluded herself into believing she’s serving the greater good.”

Greater good? She had to be the most coldly ruthless woman I’d ever met. She’d killed my mother and father to reach her ends, and for what? “All this time, all she wanted was the key so she could retrieve her plans?”

“Not only the key,” Papa stated as he crossed his arms. “She also needs someone who can use it.”

IF MADAME BOUCHER NEEDED SOMEONE
who could use the key, that put us both in terrible danger. “Now she has two of us,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat.

Papa’s eyes lit up as if he had seen the fruition of a carefully laid plan. “So, you discovered how to use my key. I knew you would. You always were clever. How did you figure it out?”

I didn’t feel clever as we sat side by side on a thin feather mattress in our dark cell. We were no longer at home in our parlor discussing childish things like how I’d fared on my music lessons. The world had become very dark. My childhood seemed like a dream by comparison. I thought about
the song, and all my memories of Papa singing it to me in more carefree times. “I discovered the key when Rathford attempted to use me to unlock his time machine,” I said.

“Rathford? So he was responsible for the murders, then?” Papa asked, his brow furrowing into a disappointed scowl. “I had hoped it wasn’t true.”

“It wasn’t.” I forgot for a moment that he didn’t know anything that had happened in the last few years. I told him how Rathford had taken me in as a housemaid after the fire, in the hopes that I would reveal the key. I told him about Lucinda, and meeting Oliver, flying with the Icarus wings, and battling the Minotaur. He seemed amused at times, and in awe at others, especially when I told him about the battle with the mechanical lake monster.

I told him about Strompton using Rathford’s madness as a means to deflect suspicion while he committed murder for his political ambitions and his pride. I even confessed the horrible choice I’d had to make in the heart of Rathford’s machine to leave my parents’ deaths in the past.

Through it all, I left Will out of the story. I wasn’t ready to let my grandfather into that part of my life yet. If Papa didn’t accept him, I didn’t know what I would do.

“I’m so proud of you, my girl.” Papa smoothed my hair,
and I could see the love shining in his eyes. “You have done far more than I had ever imagined you would.”

His words reached into me and filled me with a deep satisfaction, like gorging myself on all the Christmas feasts of a lifetime. “It doesn’t change our fundamental problem. Since Boucher knows that both of us can use the key, that makes one of us expendable.”

“That is true.” Papa’s brow furrowed over his sharply defined nose. He brought his knuckle near to his mouth and tapped it forward in a contemplative way. “We have to be prepared for the worst and look for any means of escape given the opportunity.” Papa let his hand drop as he looked at me, then placed his arm over my shoulders. “We’re together now, and we’ll find a way out of this.”

“Our hopes seem so bleak.” Really our only hope was Will. I prayed that he discovered my note, that he would find some way to reach us here.

Papa pulled me more tightly to his side. “Nothing will seem bleak to me again. You’re alive. They told me you had died in the fire, and it destroyed me. After that I told Cressida I would gladly die as well before I helped her use the key.”

“Was that during the summer?” I asked.

Papa let out a heavy sigh. “I don’t know for certain. I
haven’t seen the sky in years, but it was warmer than it is now,” he said.

I stood. That was it. It all made sense now. I had wondered about the reason for the sudden shift in tactics when I’d become a student at the Academy. Up until that point Honoré had been willing to kill me to get the key. After that point, it hadn’t been merely the key he’d wanted. It had been me. If they couldn’t force my grandfather to use the key, they needed an upper hand.

I was the pawn that had put the king in check.

“Dammit,” I whispered.

“Margaret, I raised you better,” Papa scolded. Then he rubbed his face and let out a resigned huff. “Though, I can’t say it isn’t fitting in this situation.”

I paced, unable to contain the restlessness gnawing at my mind. So much weighed upon our shoulders. There was only one thing I knew for certain. “No matter what, we cannot unlock the juggernaut. It doesn’t matter what they do to us. Those plans must never come to light.”

War was bad enough, but the slaughter that would come should the juggernaut be unleashed would stain the world for generations. It could turn the tide of the war in favor of those keeping people like John and Gabrielle in slavery. Thousands, if not millions, of lives were at stake.

Papa’s lips grew thin. He gave a subtle nod, though there was no mistaking the worry in his gaze. He placed his hand on his knee and braced himself to rise. The bones stood out on the back of his hand, and cuts and bruises had turned dark and discolored against his pale skin.

His hand shook as he pushed himself to standing. He straightened to his full height, and then his head fell forward. He stumbled and crashed against the bed before collapsing.

“Papa!” I ran to his side.

He blinked as he struggled to sit up. “I’m fine. I’m quite fine.”

He didn’t look fine. He was wan and pale. It couldn’t have been healthy for him to be so thin.

He wasn’t the towering, invincible man I remembered from my childhood. The man that stood before me seemed like a shadow compared with the man he had once been.

“You’re exhausted.” I helped him up by the arm and onto the bed. “You need your rest. You have to save your strength.”

“I can’t rest,” he said, even as I pushed him back against the pillow. “I have to keep watch.” His voice sounded thin.

I gathered his hand in mine. “Let me take a turn at the watch,” I said. “Get some sleep now. I’ll wake you if there’s need.”

It took a long time for Papa to settle down. He didn’t seem to want to stop looking at me. He fought his exhaustion as his chin dipped toward his chest. I continued to hold his hand, not wanting to break the connection between us until he finally gave in. His breathing became even, and I was certain he had fallen into a deep sleep, perhaps for the first time in years.

“I’ll watch over you,” I said as I placed a gentle kiss on his forehead. I realized suddenly that those words were what my mother used to say to me when I had too many worries and couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t ready to be the one to bear the weight of it all, but as I looked at Papa, I knew he could not. I had to find the strength in me somewhere. He was my family. I would be strong for him.

I sat at the foot of the bed, but I couldn’t still my mind. I wondered how many endless days and nights Papa had stared at the cage holding him prisoner. If there was a weakness in it, he would have found it by now. Papa was a mechanical genius, and I had no doubt of his desperation to escape. I felt it all too acutely. Time ticked on, punctuated by the rattling saw blades.

The blades spun through the bars of the cage, an endless, deadly ballet of moving parts. The rest of the walls were
solid stone blocks. Trying to burrow through them would be as useless as bashing my head against them. The only way out was through the door in the prison bars, and yet those perpetually moving saw blades had me at an impasse. With the cage door shut, the tracks aligned to allow the saws to move freely over the bars of the door. I couldn’t touch or inspect the bars in any way so long as I feared losing my hand to those saws.

I had to stop the saws. Papa was fading, and we wouldn’t have long before our captors returned. There had to be a way to dismantle the cage somehow. It was an extremely complex structure, between the bars and the tracks for the spinning blades. Complex structures always had weaknesses. I needed enough time to find that weakness and exploit it. I had to try even if it seemed impossible.

I walked straight toward my opponent. The blades gleamed in reply. The light from the lantern flickered. There was a strange beauty to the blades, in spite of their macabre nature. They almost looked like falling snowflakes as they moved along the tracks.

If I could stop the saws, that would give me time to figure out how to open the door. I needed something I could use. I had only once felt this trapped in my life. I’d been locked in a
trunk, and I’d managed to escape by breaking the hinges on the lid with the tools I’d had tucked in my pockets.

This time I had no tools, for I had no pockets. My only resources lay upon my person, and my clothing wasn’t even my own. It was Marie Marguerite’s and far too confining for my tastes.

They weren’t my clothes.

I looked down at my skirts. I wore a cage crinoline! Thank the Lord for impractical fashion. It was modest, but it would do. Though I had to contort myself in an unseemly way, I managed to struggle free from the cage that held my skirts aloft. Working quickly, I ripped and tore at the crinoline until I had freed one of the bands of steel running through the hooped skirt. With the fabric covering it, it would cause quite a muddle if it tangled up with the saws.

At least, I hoped it would. The steel bands in the crinoline were meant to be flexible and light, not strong. I didn’t know if the band would hold, but it was the best idea I had.

I bent part of the hoop from the skirt into a small loop and brought it toward the largest of the blades as it moved to the right. I could feel my heart fluttering in my throat. If I weren’t careful, I could end this venture with no fingers. The loop had barely touched the blade when the teeth caught it
and jerked my hand toward the saw. I let go, falling backward as the metal strand from the hoop whipped wildly about. I ducked and it nearly slashed me in the face.

A grinding noise filled our small chamber, and the gears and saw blade strained. Still, the machine pulled more and more of the metal into it, devouring the band as bits of metal and fabric flew out from the saw teeth. I covered my head until the grinding squeal eased to a constant high whine and the loud cracks and snaps of whipping steel slapping against the metal cage bars ceased.

Lifting my head, I peered cautiously through my fingers. The large saw blade trembled as it pulled against the binding I had inflicted upon it. Pushing myself from the floor, I held my breath and waited for the bonds to snap and the blade to start whirring again. The rest of the saws vibrated as well. Some turned as if trying to cheat the constraints that tied all the blades mechanically together. They slowed to a halt.

It had worked.

I couldn’t believe it had worked.

Now I had to get past the lock and we’d be free. Hopefully the racket I had made hadn’t caught the notice of anyone above us. I glanced back at Papa. He stirred and mumbled something incoherent. I hurried to him and soothed him back to sleep. He
settled again, clearly exhausted. Breathing a sigh of relief, I ran a hand over my head, smoothing the hair that had flown from its confines. Hopefully, no one else had woken.

Something loud clicked, and then I heard a loud
thunk
behind me. A gear clattered, followed by an ominous scraping on the floor.

I desperately prayed it was the final death throes of the cage. Instinct told me it wasn’t.

Somehow my heart managed to pound faster as I peered over my shoulder.

The wall had advanced!

I jumped back as the cage-wall with the tethered saw blades inched steadily forward, sliding over the stone floor.

Dear God, it was coming toward me.

“Papa!” I screamed, stumbling backward over my elongated skirts and landing against my grandfather. He woke, his whole body tensed.

“The wall.” The large saw blade groaned as it strained against the metal wound around it. Twice it slipped and buzzed at us like an angry wasp. All the while the wall inched closer. The saw blades turned in short bursts of motion every time the hoop slipped. It wasn’t stopping. By God in heaven, it could crush us if it didn’t stop.

Papa leapt forward. “What happened?”

“I tried to stop the blades.” The large blade slipped on the shredded hoop again, flinging a piece of the hoop right at our heads. We both shied away from one another, and it struck the wall right between us. The cage reached the halfway point of the room. With the saws spinning, the wall would tear us to shreds. I grabbed a loop of the fabric-covered steel trapped in the gears and pulled.

Papa grabbed it as well and unwound it from the axle of the blade as fast as he could. With eyes wide and his teeth gritted, he pulled, then drew his hand back to keep from being cut.

I wrapped the steel band as well as I could around my hand and tugged, but it wasn’t easy with the bars constantly moving toward me. I threw my weight back, and the saw spun more freely, slowing the press of the cage.